An imaginative and amusing romp for middle school readers … and adults!
Terry Pratchett is most well known for his Discworld series, which is written for adults. But some of his books that I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones in which he targets a younger set of readers. The Bromeliad Trilogy is a fine example. It is less commonly referred to as The Nome Trilogy, because it tells the story of little people called “nomes”, who at one point are compared with pixies without wings.
The first book of the trilogy, Truckers, tells the story of a small community of nomes who take the bold step of travelling across a motorway, and enter the Arnold Bros department store. To their surprise, they discover another community of nomes who don’t believe that the “Outside” even exists. But the skeptics are forced to put their disbelief aside when “The Store”, which contains “All Things Under One Roof”, is labelled for demolition. With the assistance of “The Thing” – a black cube which eventually turns out to be an electronic device that can compute and speak – they need to work together to commandeer a truck and flee to the world outside.
The second book, Diggers, sees the nome community established at a nearby Quarry, where they need to protect themselves against humans intent on reopening the facility, and must overcome the challenge of their own internal division. In the final book, Wings, several nomes are on a mission to bring the Thing to a space shuttle launching from Florida, so it can summon their mother ship from space to return to earth and rescue them. This features more absurdity as they make their way to an airport and sneak onto a Concorde flight.
A key theme in the books is the idea of epistemology, and how our knowledge can often be limited to what we’ve experienced, which can lead to us denying realities outside of that. To illustrate this, Pratchett uses a frequently recurring metaphor of South American tree frogs that spend their lives in a plant called a “bromeliad” (hence the title of the trilogy), not knowing anything of the outside world.
Closely related are religious themes, and how people can group themselves into communities that defend their beliefs. Pratchett was openly an atheist and humanist, but it’s not immediately clear to me whether this story is intended as a vehicle for his own beliefs. You could even read the trilogy as a defense of believing in the unseen and in the unknown, since the first book especially shows the folly of nomes who go purely by what they can observe.
In the end, despite the deeper themes that these three books touch on, they are first and foremost an entertaining and good read, and it’s the clever humor and comic relief that is the chief point of appeal. I especially loved the fresh perspective that the nomes have on life in the modern world, and the absurd conclusions they come to about things that for us are “normal”, but their wacky observations and insights make complete sense given their limited perspectives and narrow experience of the world. I found the first book to be the best, but the entire series is thoroughly charming, entertaining, and enjoyable all round.
by EndersGame_Reviewer